VIEW FROM PARIS SAYS THE OLYMPICS WON, WITH U.S.-WEMBY POSSIBLY IN THE END

The city is thrilled to bring back the Summer Games, with large ratings accompanying major performances — if a basketball final featuring Team USA and Wembanyama also would create historic importance

     PARIS — The goddesses of sight, the jujus of observation, have placed me atop a hotel where I’m eyeballing a tower, a cathedral, a river and rows of bridges through a tricolored twirl. You should feel the continuing buzz of my mental processes. See a forceful wave of flags from French people who’ve saved the Olympic movement from itself and the planet, and if you say otherwise, just ask them as they scream.

     We were about to bury the Games in a cemetery with Napoleon Bonaparte, if not Jim Morrison, while telling Inspector Clouseau he wasn’t the biggest bumbler. But when I looked at the River Seine, I didn’t try to see enterococci, E. coli or bacteria. I saw delight. I saw honor. I saw Francais. I saw Victor Hugo, Coco Chanel, the Joan of Arc, Voltaire and, if you’ve never heard the name, Gustave Eiffel. Celine Dion hails from Quebec, in Canada, but they treat her like a local anyway.

     France happens to wave a better red, white and blue then America does. Did they steal our flag from us, or the other way around? That’s my view of how a nation has embraced the event and at least hosted our athletes at their best. They would include Simone Biles, Noah Lyles, Katie Ledecky, the women’s soccer and basketball teams and, of course, sumptuous NBA players who battle Steve Kerr about playing time but should win gold medals anyway.

     The NBC/Universal chairman, Mark Lazarus, sees audience averages exceed 35 million a day and says, “Clearly, the Olympics are back.” His scene anchor, Mike Tirico, added of the 74 percent increase since Tokyo: “I think the Olympics needed a boost. I think the Olympics needed some energy. And no COVID and fans … but I also think it’s Paris.” The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, does headstands when he refuses to decide if two women boxers are men or transgender.

     “Just seeing the kind of support that the French athletes are getting here, I think all the U.S. athletes are thinking about how cool that would be in Los Angeles,” Ledecky said of the 2028 Olympics, which should achieve the same ratings mastery.

     The last high-meaning debate is whether Team USA wins gold for the fifth straight time with a billionaire, LeBron James, and a few who aren’t far away. Again, a victory should happen after a 122-87 lashing of Brazil, which prompted Jayson Tatum to say, “Everybody expects us to win.” That is: If they amble past Victor Wembanyama. He could give the hoops universe — and the crazed French — a rocking match against America in the Saturday finals. For it to happen, Wemby and his controversy-mucked teammates would have to beat Germany in a Thursday semifinal while the Americans beat Nikola Jokic and Serbia. If it does, all you need to know is how Victor raised his arms as 20,000 fans roared his name at Bercy Arena.

     Bigger than Leon Marchand in the pool.

     This while James needed four stitches to close a gash by his left eye. He could have been resting, but he played and suffered a shot from Georginho de Paula. “I’m all right. Got him with an inadvertent elbow. We see an opportunity ahead.” He’ll be fine, with Kerr saying in a generalized wave, “For a guy who truly is a point forward at heart, for him to be the leading scorer in NBA history when that's kind of the secondary thing that he does, he's crazy. But that's LeBron.”

     I’m not sure if Joel Embiid brought earplugs. He will need 1,000 as people continue to boo him while Wembanyama, a 7-5 homeland luminary, seeks another amazing tale. A chop move, taken from the WWE, won’t work again as Embiid riddled Brazil with 14 points and seven rebounds in a first-half spree. For now, he’s worried about being fined, which happened twice in the NBA for the same gesture. “Oh no, they still might find a way, but that felt good,” he said. “It's good to have fun, too, because at the end of the day, you got to take something out of this experience. If the fans want to go on me, I’m going to tell ’em to … I’m not gonna say the word.” All the while, his mates roared for him and waved at the booing fans.

     Yet even if Wembanyama excels as he did later in his first NBA season, what was France coach Vincent Collet doing? He benched Rudy Gobert and Evan Fournier and went with another new starting lineup, which worked against a better Canada team. Afterward, Gobert told reporters he underwent “surgery” on an injured left ring finger Monday and was fortunate to play. Collet bucked him again, saying Gobert didn’t have surgery but only examined the finger. Down went Gobert, the league’s four-time Defensive Player of the Year. Collet was playing small instead of going 7-5 and 7-1.

     “Yesterday evening, despite the (doctor) saying he could play, he had pain, so we didn’t know exactly (if) he could play,” Collet said. “But finally, this morning, he said, ‘I can play.’ But my idea was to protect him if I could do it, (and) I wanted to have him on the bench. As it was working well with the other big men, I prefer to keep him on the bench and he will be ready for the next game.”

     Said Wembanyama, whose NBA coach, Gregg Popovich, sat in the stands: “We all had to realize our roles, our history and the direction we wanted to take. We had four days — a lot of time to think and fix things. The players were dedicated to fixing everything.”

     First, the French must beat the emotionally rich Germans, while the American quiet a three-time NBA MVP. Does Jokic really bug them at this point? Not as much as Wemby and the wild crowd. “These guys have really turned it up,” Kerr said. “They’ve played really well for these four games, but our two toughest games will be the next two, no matter what happens. So we’ve got work to do.”

     When I see the Seine, I feel terrible for marathon swimmers and triathletes who trained hard and dealt with … sewage and who knows what? This is the one flaw of Paris, with Mayor Anne Hidalgo continuing to say, “We will of course wait to get the results of the water quality but the event will take place because there’s been a clear improvement of the weather these past few days. So I’m really proud and happy and to all those who want to continue saying it’s impossible to depollute a river, I tell them, ‘Yes it’s possible, we did it.’ ’’

     Or, you say you did and did not. But when we judge Paris, with a few days left, we will ask about terror and violence. So far, we’ve only seen headless Marie Antoinettes and “The Last Supper” at the opening ceremony, which Donald Trump managed to move past.

     Paris wins. The people wear cockerel hats. The Olympics carry on to Los Angeles, where the panoramic scene won’t be as pretty. And I live there.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.